I decided to deviate some from my Julia Child meatloaf recipe and go with a 50% lean ground beef, 25% ground pork, and 25% ground veal that I got from the butcher in the back of my local Lohai store. I also used some fresh bread crumbs from the bakery but ran them through the food processor to get the exra fine grind.

The marinara sauce is really the key and I am still working on that. I really don't do much Italian cooking so my recipe for this needs some work. But for now I am combining 4 peeled and seeded tomatoes (Chinese tomatoes are really tasty) with a 28oz can of Italian whole tomates. Everything gets hand crushed and cooked in the pan after I brown the meatballs. It was pretty damn good this last time, but I need to get a finer chop on the onions along with better garlic. All I know is you could pour almost anything over the fresh pasta from my Imperia and it would still taste awesome.
Best part about doing meatballs is I put the extras in the fridge so I can have a meatball sub on a fresh french roll from the Symphony bakery (Beijing).. Fresh parmesan.... oh yeah.

I've been craving some chicken pot pie and when I saw fresh peas at Jenny Lou I decided to go for it. I used a ceramic dish I picked up at the Pantry Magic sale along with a new pie crust recipe. The crust is from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. 1, page 140. I used the version for the food processor and it was the strangest pie crust/dough I have ever made. It was very, very wet and had a consistency like fluffy sand. I scooped it out on a floured board and was only able to roll it to between 1/2 and 3/4" (1.3 - 2 cm). I was sure it was a failure but wow.... was one of the best pot pie crusts I have ever had. I need to go back and make it again, as well as the hand version to see if I am doing it correctly.

I received a depressing email this morning that Pantry Magic is going to shut down in Beijing. It seems they are looking for a new owner to reopen later, but as of now there are no certain plans. Items are up to 50% off for the close, so I nabbed a great cast iron casserole dish, and some ceramic bakeware. Pantry Magic was really the only decent store for cooking items that I knew of in Beijing. The stores at Lufthansa Center were ridiculously priced. At least Pantry Magic had great quality at close to U.S. prices.

I have two .5 kilo packages of dutch cocoa powder that were brought back from the U.S. about a year ago and I need to start using them. It makes wicked hot chocolate by the way. Anyway, I tried a recipe off of Food TV that combines a basic peanut butter cookie recipe with cocoa and then blackberry jam centers. Wowsa..... was good stuff.